MacArthur’s Nuclear Shower on China: “I would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs”

[william]

“I could have won the war in Korea in a maximum of 10 days.”In a 1954 interview, Douglas MacArthur described the offensive he believed he had been denied during the Korean War.

First, 30 to 50 atomic bombs would fall on enemy airfields and military depots across Manchuria, from Antung (now Dandong) on the Yalu River to Hunchun near the Soviet border. Dropped at night, he said, they would destroy enemy aircraft, pilots and maintenance crews on the ground.

At the time, China itself had no nuclear weapons. China would not conduct its first atomic bomb test until October 16, 1964, more than 11 years after the Korean War armistice.

He would then launch two amphibious landings with 500,000 of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese troops and two U.S. Marine divisions: at Antung in the west and Unggi or Najin in the east.Those forces would converge along Korea’s northern frontier while the U.S. Eighth Army attacked from the south, trapping Communist forces inside Korea.

Behind the advancing troops, MacArthur wanted to spread radioactive cobalt in a belt stretching from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea. He claimed it would block an invasion from the north for at least 60 years. “The enemy could not have marched across that radiated belt.”

The atomic bombs were never dropped, the landings never happened, and the radioactive belt was never laid.MacArthur’s dangerous idea became public only after his death in 1964.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2111262400251118029

 

[DEFCON Warning System]

The world would certainly be a different place if nuclear weapons were used in Vietnam, Korea, or even to stop Russia at the start of the Cold War.

 

[william]

The world would certainly be a different place if nuclear weapons were used in Vietnam, Korea, or even to stop Russia at the start of the Cold War.

I don't think MacArther liked people of Asian descent very well after WWII. IMO